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Monday, May 12, 2014

ArchiPortrait – Architecturally Yours!

By Team IAnD

Photography: Courtesy the designer

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Italian graphic designer
and illustrator, Federico Babina’s penchant for building design finds an
expressionist rendering in his series on architect’s visages inspired from and
incarcerated in their individual architectural contributions…

Expressing the fact that “the geometry
of architecture can reveal unexpected and surprising forms”, where an eye, a
mouth or a facial profile can be read between the structures of a building, Federico
Babina plays with the signature structures and elements thereof of 33 well
recognized architects of the
20th and 21st century, to illustrate their visages.

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“Each architect is its
architecture,” says Federico, whose artistic representation called
‘ArchiPortrait’ is a fun exercise that entices the onlooker to break down and
dissect the features (eyes, nose, lips, wrinkles, facial lines) to detect the
hidden projects of the most well-known protagonists of contemporary
architecture.

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Giving an architectural
silhouette to his graphically illustrated portraits, the intent is to display
the likeness, personality, and even the mood of the protagonist through his
aesthetic; to summarize and photograph in one image the architect and his work;
a metaphor of architecture, where every little detail is a key component of the
whole mosaic.

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Federico has neither
contacted the architects before nor after this exercise. He never does. With the
designer’s fascination for
architecture, his series are predominantly architecturally inclined – be it
ArchiCine – architecture in movies; Archist – artists and their architectural musings;
ArchiSet – rooms featured in classic films; or the just unveiled – ArchiMachine
that metaphorically uses architecture as the fulcrum of society.

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In the series on
ArchiPortrait, Federico uses simple geometry juxtaposed without the illusions
of perspective, where diverse elements could be superimposed, made transparent
or penetrate one another, while retaining their spatial relationships. He
develops an expressive and allusive abstraction in which he combines planar
structures with three-dimensional shapes to achieve a kind of metaphysical
expression.

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“To achieve a
satisfactory result for the representation of architects was like doing an architectural
project,” he muses; “The hardest part of each image was to decide on a theme,
set image to illustration and take the real or reinterpreted items and compose
them in a balanced set,” he concludes.

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Herein, lies a light
hearted - not irreverent take on a serious field like architecture, a break
from the normal, where the Mother of all Arts is often embroiled in otherwise
weighty discussions.